I'm curious to know how programmer teams typically managed their software development back in the 80s and early 90s. Was all the source code simply stored on one machine which everyone worked on, or was the source passed around and copied manually via floppy and merged manually, or did they actually use revision control systems over a network (CVS for example) like how we do now? Or perhaps something like an offline CVS was being used?
Nowadays everyone is dependent on source control.. it's a no-brainer. But in the 80s, computer networks weren't that easy to set up, and things like best practices were still being figured out…
I do know that in the 70s and 60s programming was pretty different so revision control was not necessary. But it's in the 80s and 90s that people started using computers for writing code, and applications started increasing in size and scope, so I am wondering how people managed all that back then.
Also, how does this differ between platforms? Say Apple vs Commodore 64 vs Amiga vs MS-DOS vs Windows vs Atari
Note: I'm mostly talking about programming on microcomputers of the day, not big UNIX machines.
Best Answer
Firstly when microcomputers first come out, the software was mostly written on Unix or VMS systems and “cross compiler/assembled” onto the target system. These computer systems were multi user often with many terminals and had source coded control systems like SCCS.
Networking was an option on microcomputers from the mid 1980s, often connected to a Unix system as the "file server" (maybe just using RS232 and Kermit to transfer the files, with SCCS on the Unix system)
See A History of Version Control by Eric Sink to get a overview of how version control system have changed over the years.
I recall reading about source code control in "BYTE" in the late 1980s, so it must have been in use on "small systems" by then.
SourceSafe was well established by the mid 90s running on Dos, Windows, etc.
This link shows an article about PVCS running on PC from 1994, it is at version 6.2 so had clearly been about for some time, Wikipedia says it dates from 1985.
However numbered floppy disks were used by most programmers working on small scale software until the late 1990s, to be replaced with folders on their hard disk, making a copy of the source code every day.
I remember working on a project porting software from Unit to Windows NT 3.5. Programmers that know how to write programs for Windows often had not even heard of source code control.
This timeline is taken from a blog post by codicesoftware, they sell Plastic SCM, however the overview of the history of other systems seems reasonable, a few older system before RCS are left of the image.